Monday, January 11, 2010

Problem: The traditional auto-responder

SkyHi @ Monday, January 11, 2010
Description: A message is sent in response to inbound email informing the purported sender that you are on vacation, listing FAQs or otherwise sending a standard message - all too often, to the wrong person.

Solution: Do not use these systems. Inform your normal corespondents of your absence before you depart. Or let a co-worker answer your email in your absence. Publish FAQ information on a web-site. If you wish to dispense information via email, it's easy to reject a message while referring the sender to a FAQ web-page. Using sendmail, this is done in the access.db table like so:

to:oldaddress@example.com 550 Old address no longer valid, please see: http://www.example.com/NewAddressInfo.html



Reference: http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html#responder